50 Paintings Explored

The best of Tom Lubbock, one of Britain's most intelligent, outspoken and revelatory art critics, is collected here for the first time.

There are electrifying insights - using Hitchcock’ s Suspicion to explore the lighting effects in a Zurbará n still life, imagining three short films to tease out the meanings of El Greco’ s Boy Lighting a Candle - and cool judgements - how Vuillard's genius is confined to a single decade, when he worked at home, why Ingres is really ‘ an exciting wierdo’ .

Ranging with passionate perspicacity over eight hundred years of Western art, whether it's Giotto’ s raging vices, Guston’ s ‘ slobbish, squidgy’ pinks, Gericault’ s pile of truncated limbs or Gwen John’ s Girl in a Blue Dress, Tom Lubbock writes with immediacy and authority about the fifty works which most gripped his imagination.

Tom Lubbock, critic and illustrator, was the chief art critic of the Independent from 1997 until his death in 2011. He wrote widely on art, books and radio and produced major catalogue essays on Goya, Thomas Bewick and Ian Hamilton Finlay. His illustrations, mainly done in collage, appeared every Saturday on the editorial page of the Independent between 1999 and 2004. His weekly Great Works column, from which these essays are taken, ran between 2005 and 2010.

If you want to know why plenty of us thought that Tom was far and away the best art critic of our generation, you should buy and relish Great Works which reprints with handsome reproductions of each image, fifty of his short essays for The Independent… Utterly free of cant, posturing and received ideas, they teem with the kind of insight that only comes from protracted looking and profound lucid thinking. Buy copies for everyone you know who likes art and wants to know how it can be talked about with beautiful sanity and zero guff.

One of Tom Lubbock's nicest habits as an art critic was to observe some quirk in a piece of art and, while distracting you with this magician's cloth and illuminate the whole work. It was a regular trick of the short essays he wrote in his 'Great Works' series: a preparatory manoeuvre priming you for the big picture. Published posthumously as a collection, Great Works deepens a neat journalistic technique into a profound way of seeing.

An endlessly lively and surprising book.

An outstanding book.

An endlessly lively and surprising book.

If you want to know why plenty of us thought that Tom was far and away the best art critic of our generation, you should buy and relish Great Works which reprints with handsome reproductions of each image, fifty of his short essays for The Independent… Utterly free of cant, posturing and received ideas, they teem with the kind of insight that only comes from protracted looking and profound lucid thinking. Buy copies for everyone you know who likes art and wants to know how it can be talked about with beautiful sanity and zero guff.

One of Tom Lubbock's nicest habits as an art critic was to observe some quirk in a piece of art and, while distracting you with this magician's cloth and illuminate the whole work. It was a regular trick of the short essays he wrote in his 'Great Works' series: a preparatory manoeuvre priming you for the big picture. Published posthumously as a collection, Great Works deepens a neat journalistic technique into a profound way of seeing.